Tag Archives: morality

After the highly publicized suicides of several US teens, a nation-wide discussion about the dangers of bullying has been sparked. In Massachusetts, 9 teens are facing charges for their bullying, which, prosecutors argue, led to the suicide of 15 year-old Phoebe Prince in January. As in the case of Phoebe Prince, modern bullying often takes place off school grounds in a form that past generations were more protected from. Nowadays, cyberbullying (bullying online or through cell phones) is becoming increasingly common.

An article in Psychology in the Schools outlines some of the elements differentiate cyberbullying from regular bullying. The author reviews past research on online behaviour among children, in an attempt to understand why young people are increasingly becoming involved in cyberbullying. According to the authors, there is much research suggesting that the anonymity of the Internet is fostering disinhibition and reducing concern for others. Psychologists and authors of the book “Mean Girls, Meaner Women” seem to support this; they argue that bullying is becoming increasingly common because young people aren’t being require to interact with each other face-to-face, and instead learn communication skills over the Internet. If this is the case, perhaps we should expect to see an increase in other examples of anti-social behaviour from teens who intensively communicate online.

However, it also might be a bit unfair to place the blame entirely on the Internet, when other factors (e.g. parenting, education, etc.) probably still play a strong, if not stronger, role in developing children’s sense of right and wrong. Perhaps the Internet provides a new setting for bullies to harass victims, a place harder for victims to get away from. But maybe those kids would have been bullies even before the Internet and cell phones.

Every student of social psychology remembers studying Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment. His studies shaped future thinking about authority, extreme group behavior, and morality. Many of those same psychology students, captivated by the lure of such exciting and revealing studies, would have also learned that you can no longer actually do that kind of research anymore.

The BBC recently reenacted the Milgram experiment for TV and now, the French have added their own twist. The BBC recently reported on a French TV documentary, which showed that under the guise of a game show, contestants were willing to send an electrical shock to other contestants– sometimes at dangerous levels. These types of TV “experiments” are not subject to the same ethical considerations social psychologists are. Of course, this also means they are also not subject to the same expectation of scientific rigour. It’s always somewhat exciting to see confirmation (even in a highly unscientific setting) that what was shown by Milgram in the 60s may still hold true today. However, the potential harm to participants from that type of experiment justifies the ethical limitations preventing such research.

Is there a middle ground?

Some psychologists have found that they can still re-do old experiments but also reduce potential harm to their participants by moving the experiments from the physical world into a virtual world. Two researchers in France used virtual reality to re-examine Milgram’s ideas. Like Milgram, they found that participants showed more obedience when they couldn’t see the victim and they also found that participants felt less distress when the victim was from North Africa than when he was of their same ethnic background. Virtual reality has opened up a way for psychologists to do research on extreme behaviour, but minimize harm to participants. Perhaps both psychologists and participants can benefit from future use of virtual reality as a medium for experiments.

In November 2009, the Philippine Commission on Elections issued a disqualification against an LGBT partylist group, accusing it of advocating immorality. This in turn, triggered an ‘I Am Not Immoral’ campaign by members of the LGBT community and supporters. The issue of morality, according to Steven Pinker pervades all aspects of our lives, and he refers to moral goodness, as ‘something that makes us feel worthy as human beings’. Morality has been deemed universal and yet culturally expressed. Pinker identifies five aspects of morality: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity, acknowledging that each culture may choose to give more preference to any aspect over another.
Krebs (2008) looks into the evolutionary beginnings of morality and discusses adaptations in the brain brought on by both early and modern circumstances. These early circumstances have caused certain adaptations, decision making strategies, that are triggered in modern events that evoke familiarity of setting, such as the need for certain responses such as obedience, conformity or others. One also must understand the adaptive functions of morality in order to understand what it is. Using the evolutionary theory, morality is when an individual’s genetic self-interest is promoted through a genuine concern for the welfare of others.

Since Gilligan (1982) established the theory of moral development, feminist psychologists have provided some interesting analysis to show, not whether morality is essentially gendered, but rather, how morality can be invoked to warrant gendered complaints (Muntigl and Turnbull, 1998). For example Stokoe (2003) demonstrated, from interview transcripts of neighbour’s disputes, how female categories such as ‘mothers, ‘single women’ and ‘sluts’ were made relevant (both explicitly and implicitly) in order to judge each other’s moral behaviour (Stokoe, 2003:320). In the following extract from The Sunday Mail’s exclusive interview with the dismissed Yeoman, I will suggest that much of the Yeoman’s warrant for unfair dismissal rests on invoking his former female colleagues status as a ‘single woman’. Consider the following extract in which the Beefeater describes the appointment of the first female Yeoman.

‘What concerned me most, and what caused apprehension and shock among the wives of the Beefeaters, was that she was single.…I have seen a lot of very good friends’ marriages go down the pan in the Army, not because they have done anything, but because other people perceive they have done something…It is not difficult to see the potential for trouble in employing a single woman. Naturally there was some ribald speculation as to what she might look like and whether she would wear high heels with her scarlet tunic’.

In this extract the Beefeater constructs an interpretative frame within which to interpret her appointment. Notice that he deploys the category ‘single woman’. Such a categorisation carries with it a host of inferences that can be traded on, and made available, as a stock of common-sense knowledge about ‘single women’ e.g. being sexually available. However, this alone is not sufficient to provide an immoral account of her. One way in which this can be achieved is by implying that certain types of ‘single women’ are immoral based on their activities (Wowk, 1984). Since gender relations are managed by the norms of monogamy, women (but not men) who are perceived to be a threat to this rule can be held morally accountable. Although the Beefeater does not explicitly state that she was ‘sexually overt’, she is positioned as such through speculation of ‘whether she would wear high heels with her scarlet tunic’ and as a potential cause marital problems for male colleagues. In this way then, the female Yeoman’s ‘single woman’ status is linked to immorality.

Beefeater sacked for harassing first female Yeoman tells how her arrival caused ructions at the Tower… and cost him his job

Social Psychology and Discourse

Mothers, Single Women and Sluts: Gender, Morality and Membership Categorization in Neighbour Disputes

Immediately after the arrest of Roman Polanski, an overwhelming and surprising movement of support for a man convicted of drugging and raping a 13 year old girl in 1977 came from Hollywood celebrities to political leaders. In return the media has certainly responded with a backlash of criticism towards those who seem to expect Polanski to be treated differently because of his status or have actually defended his crime as being less appalling than the hard facts have suggested. In addition to being a sufficiently disturbing example of how many people still believe that being famous provides a free-pass from moral standards, the entire case also serves as a sobering reminder that rape myths are still predominant in the world despite the large amount of discourse examining them.

Rape myth was a term coined in 1980 to describe the false beliefs that people have about rape, rapists, and rape victims. These can include beliefs that only certain types of women are raped or that rapists are usually aggressive, desperate males. Many of the public comments from Polanski’s high-profile defenders have only worked to perpetuate some of these long standing beliefs about rape. One common rape myth is that only strange, scary men rape. Polanski just doesn’t fit that stereotype. Many celebrities may see him as part of their group, and it’s hard to imagine someone in our group doing something which we commonly ascribe to occurring elsewhere and “not to us”. So his “friends” were left with having to find ways to make his actions seem less immoral. Meanwhile, our love of “The Pianist” makes us unable to cope with the inconsistancy of our affinity for a man who created something we like and detest for his deplorable actions.

Some argued in Polanski’s defence by derogating the victim. Many people reporting on the incident said that Polanski couldn’t have known she was only 13 because she acted more like an adult than a child. All these statement work to further the myth that only certain types of women (and thus, only “other” women) are raped. Rape myths reflect people’s just-world needs. We need to make sense of something terrible that happens so we fall back on our desire to believe that the world is ultimately just and thus, those who were raped must have deserved it. Given the incredible sway and press that celebrities receive, their support for rape myths is particularly frightening. Unfortunately, time and time again these myths have been shown to not only be untrue, they are dangerous. They place blame on rape-victims which can lead to fewer women reporting sexual crimes and, as the case of Polanski has shown, can lead to less support for justice.

Coleen Nolan’s recent televised revelation that she made a sex tape provides an interesting example of how talk and discourse is saturated with moral work. Her self-confession allowed for a host of consequential moral assumptions to be made about her making of a sex tape. These assumptions rest on the known-in-common attributes that are associated with gender categories. The apparent ‘shock’ experienced by her sons, panel and audience about the revelation allows us to see her actions as a ‘breach’ to the common-sense cultural knowledge about how ‘moral types of women’ (e.g. mothers) should behave.

Wowk’s (1984) research from a murder suspect interrogation and Stokoe’s (2003) neighbour disputes research provide interesting examples of this moral accountability in practice. Their data revealed that peoples’ perceptions of morality, in relation to women, were aligned with specific activities and characteristics for ‘good mothers’ (e.g. ‘sexually discreet’, ‘mother-as-childcarer’) and ‘bad mothers’ (e.g. ‘being overtly sexual’, ‘swearing’). They also found that moral judgments were often non-explicit and smuggled in through indirect references to illicit behaviour in order to subtly police moral boundaries. Coleen’s sons, the panel and the audience therefore, by their very (re)actions, can be seen to be unavoidably engaged in producing and sustaining a gendered moral order out of the particulars provided by Coleen.Loose Women – Coleen Nolan

Coleen Nolan shocks the Loose Women TV audience – and her sons – as she admits to starring in a sex tape

Social Psychology and Discourse

Mothers, Single Women and Sluts: Gender, Morality and Membership Categorization in Neighbour Disputes

The ‘Partner exploitation and violence in teenage intimate relationships’ research by the NSPCC and Bristol University provides us with an interesting (and alarming) glimpse at ‘standardised relational pair’ categories (Sacks, 1992) and the moral accountability attached to them (Jayussi, 1984). Sacks’ work on categories and their deployment found that certain categories go together like ‘boyfriend–girlfriend’. Members of these categories which form ‘standardised relational pairs’ have rights, responsibilities and duties to each other. In our example ‘boyfriend–girlfriend’, it is presumed that each person should provide a safe, supportive, caring and respectful relationship environment for each other to grow and develop. It follows then that category pairs and associated predicates (rights, responsibilities etc) are relational in the sense that one may be expected to follow the next with accountability as a moral-procedural requirement. Breaches between these categories and predicates ‘one in six said they had been pressured into sexual intercourse and 1 in 16 said they had been raped’, tend to generate moral outrage/alarm and interactional repair solutions ‘parents and schools can perform a vital role in teaching them about loving and safe relationships, and what to do if they are suffering from violence or abuse’.Teen girls abused by boyfriends warns NSPCC

Gender-Based Violence

Objectification Theory and Psychology of Women: A Decade of Advances and Future Directions